text:
Sorry for the delay in publishing the show report but due to family bereavement we have had lots of demands on our time.
Many, many thanks to everyone who helped to make Hammerhead 2016 bigger and better than ever. The total attendance was more than 20% higher than the previous year with 1217 on the wrist band count plus a small number of traders and gamers who evaded our wrist band girls during the very busy pre-show set-up period before the show opened at 10 am.
On the set-up day, Friday, we were contacted by one manufacturer who informed us that he could not make it because 8 inches of snow had prevented van access to his unit! With heavy snow straddling the M62 and blizzard conditions forecast to the south on the day of the show, we were to say the least a little concerned that the weather might have a detrimental effect. However, wargamers and traders are a hardy, intrepid breed and in the end only two traders and two participation games couldn't make it. In fact at Newark on the show day the weather was very pleasant indeed with sun light streaming through the south facing glass frontage.
The 53 participation games which occupied the central area of the massive George Stevenson Exhibition Hall were very much the beating heart of the show. The hundreds of gamers who gave their time, skills, hard work and incredible imagination in the creation of so many brilliant games deserve a round of applause for their sterling efforts. With so many different games to play and enjoy many of the visiting gamers 'stayed all day,' which has become the norm for Hammerhead. It was an exceedingly hard task for the judges to find just three games from the fantastic collection in show for the Hammerhead 2016 Games awards. Trophies were presented for the following categories;
Participation Games Awards Hammerhead 2016
1) Best Visually Appealing Game: Oldhammer/Spot the Preditor! by The Bunker
2) Best Constructed Participation Game: Operation Grünewüste - Invasion of Sjøbolig by Hysterical Games
3) Overall Best Game: Stingray by South London Warlords
The table-top sales proved to be even more popular than last year with all tables occupied for all the one hour time slots with spare tables only available for the last session of the afternoon. The good thing about this system is that that the gamers re-visit the TTS area every hour to see what new goodies have appeared after each hourly change over.
A big thank you to the members of The Forest Outlaws Wargames Club who helped with the car-parking and security, in particular, keeping the parking bays in front of the building clear for use by disabled visitors. As well as running some of the games, they were also key to setting-up and collecting and stacking hundreds of tables and chairs before and after the show. Without their sterling efforts, especially at the end of the show, trader vehicle access into the hall would have been delayed considerably – well done lads and lases!
Although the day went smoothly and we have received very positive feedback both on the day and after the event, we will not become complacent and have already identified a number of areas that can be improved upon in readiness for next years' show.
Finally, a very big and sincere thank you to all the visitors, game presenters and traders who all helped to make Hammerhead a 'celebration of the hobby' and very much 'the gamers show'.
Below is a collection of images taken at Hammerhead 2016 for you to enjoy
The date for next years' Hammerhead is Saturday 4th March 2017.
There are several online reports and blogs you may like to read;
http://wargamesillustrated.net/hammerhe ... 5th-march/
http://kevswargamescabin.blogspot.co.uk ... ewark.html
http://nevermindthejankers.blogspot.co. ... games.html
http://gamingfromthecupboard.blogspot.c ... -2016.html
http://paintingshed.blogspot.co.uk/2016 ... -2016.html
http://dusttears.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03 ... -2016.html
http://scarabminiatures.com/forum/viewt ... 164#p12164
http://gamingfromthecupboard.blogspot.c ... -2016.html


text:
2012 Porsche 911
TRIM | Original MSRP | 5-Year Cost to Own | Compare |
2012 Porsche 911 Expert Review
Staff Writer
The 2012 Porsche 911 is all-new this year. Yes, it may look just like the old 911 but, make no mistake, the 911 is back and better than ever in its seventh generation. The 2012 Porsche 911 Carrera and Carrera S ride on a wheelbase that's 4.1 inches longer than the previous 911, for an overall length gain of just 2.2 inches. While bigger usually equals bad, the new 911 is more stable and a better drive then the old one, making the 2012 Porsche 911 the best 911 yet.
While there will certainly be a plethora of 911 variants soon, so far Porsche has only announced the 911 Carrera and 911 Carrera S for this year. The 2012 911 Carrera is powered by a 350-hp 3.4-liter F-6 mounted right over the rear axle, while the Carrera S gets a 400-hp 3.8-liter F-6.
For 2012 Porsche will be offering two transmissions on the 911. The fantastic Porsche Doppelkupplungsgetriebe (PDK for short) seven-speed dual-clutch automatic returns, while Porsche also introduces an all-new seven-speed manual transmission. Porsche says its new seven-speed manual is the first of its kind in a passenger car.
Body styles: coupe, convertible
Engines: 3.6-liter flat-6, 3.8-liter flat-6, 3.6-liter twin-turbo flat-6
Transmissions: six-speed manual, seven-speed automatic
Models: Porsche 911, Porsche 911 Carrera GTS, Porsche 911 Carrera GTS 4, Porsche 911 GT2 RS, Porsche 911 GT3, Porsche 911 GT3 RS, Porsche 911 RS 4.0
Everything is new for the 2012 Porsche 911, also known as the new 991-series 911. Instead of rolling out every different model at once, Porsche has just introduced the 911 Carrera and Carrera S coupes for the 2012 model year. The 2012 Porsche 911 is slightly larger than the previous generation, with its wheelbase growing 4.1 inches, for a total body stretch of 2.2 inches. That, combined with a wider front track is supposed to make the new 911 more stable, and a better handler. The base 911 Carrera is powered by a new 3.4-liter F-6 that while smaller in displacement than the old engine, produces 5 horsepower more than the old 911, for a total of 350 hp. The 2012 911 Carrera S is powered by an updated 3.8-liter F-6 that produces 400-hp, as opposed to the old engine's 385 horsepower. The 911 has two transmission options; a seven-speed manual (the first ever in a passenger car), and a seven-speed "PDK" dual-clutch automatic.
Surprise, surprise -- the 2012 Porsche 911 looks pretty much exactly like the 2011 911. As with all new 911's, the 2012 911's new exterior is evolutionary, not revolutionary. From a distance, the 2012 911 is hard to distinguish from the previous generation. Up close though, the differences become more obvious. The new 911 has a wheelbase that's 4.1 inches longer, and a body that's stretched an overall 2.2 inches longer than the previous generation. The 2012 911 also gets new headlights, and most notably new, thinner, LED taillights.
The 2012 Porsche 911 Carrera and Carrera S' interior is probably where the biggest differences between old and new are found. The 2012 911's interior is reminiscent of the Porsche Panamera sport sedan's interior. The 2012 911 gets a richly appointed interior, with a center stack that slopes into the central tunnel at an angle, just like the one found on the Panamera, giving the 2012 911 a true cockpit-like feel. The instrument panel sees the 911's traditional five gauge layout return, though there's now a 4.8-inch screen that displays navigation instructions, audio and telephone information, and vehicle information just right of the tach.
The 2012 Porsche 911 contains a lot of new technology, like the first ever seven-speed manual transmission in a passenger car, a seven-speed "PDK" dual-clutch automatic, and fuel-saving auto start/stop included on all models. The 2012 Porsche 911 Carrera and Carrera S both have different engines. The 2012 911 Carrera gets an all-new 3.4-liter F-6 that produces 350 hp and 287 lb-ft of torque. Power is routed to the rear-wheels though all-wheel drive is certainly coming in the future. The 911 Carrera S is powered by a refreshed 3.8-liter F-6 that produces 400 hp and 325 lb-ft of torque. In our testing, a seven-speed dual-clutch transmission-equipped Carrera S accelerated from 0-60 mph in 3.7 seconds, and stopped from that speed in just 94 feet.
As can be expected in any car designed to handle the high speeds of the German Autobahn, safety was a concern for Porsche with the 2012 911 Carrera and 911 Carrera S. The 2012 911 Carrera and Carrera S both include six airbags including a front driver and front passenger airbag, and standard safety amenities like anti-lock brakes, traction control, and electronic stability control. Porsche also used a large amount of high-strength steel in the body of the 2012 911 to enhance occupant protection.
911 Carrera: N/A
911 Carrera S: N/A
- Driving the best 911 ever
- The VW Beetle jokes
- Pricey options
Still worthy of its iconic status
- Chevrolet Corvette
- Jaguar XKR/XKR-S
- Lotus Evora
- Maserati GranTurismo
- Nissan GT-R
- Porsche Cayman
2012 Porsche 911 Specifications
Engine Name | 6-Cyl, 3.6 Liter |
Trim | Carrera (997) Coupe |
Horsepower | 345@6,500 |
Torque | 288@4,400 |
Number Of Cylinders | 6 |
Front Headroom | N/A |
Rear Headroom | N/A |
Front Legroom | N/A |
Rear Legroom | N/A |
Front Shoulder Room | N/A |

subset: commoncrawl


text:
It takes place each year, on the 26th and the 27th of the third month of the lunar calendar. During these two days, hundreds of ex-lovers from various hill tribes like Nung, Tay, San Chi, Lo Lo, Dzao, Giay and Hmong are reunited. They trek in from various mountainous districts nearby to be able to spend two days with the ones they could not spend their lives with.
This concept might sound extremely unusual to us, and there might be every possibility of a cat-fight breaking out if this unique love festival was held anywhere else in the world. But the people of Khau Vai have a strong reason for the celebrating their love market. It has been a part of their tradition for centuries, originating from a local legend. The story is rather sad – an ethnic Giay girl from Ha Giang had fallen for a Nung boy from Cao Bang, but she is said to have been so beautiful that her tribe did not want her to marry a man from another community. What followed was a bloody war between the two tribes.
As the lovers witnessed the tragedy that surrounded their lives, they decided to part ways in the greater interest of peace. But their love did not die there. A secret pact was made between the lovers to meet each other once a year in Khau Vai– on the 27th day of the third Lunar month. The tradition is still being carried on today. On the designated days of the festival, local artists decked up in colorful clothes reenact this tale of forbidden love.
Some might dismiss the lovers' rendezvous that happen in Khau Vai as short flings, but in reality things are very different. The villagers view it as a time to go down memory lane, cherishing happier moments of their past. Lau Minh Pao, for instance, gets to meet his old flame and talk to her once a year. "In the past, we were lovers, but we couldn't get married because we were far apart," says Pao. "Now we pour our hearts out about the time when we were in love. We meet together to re-tell the tale of how it was when we were in love back then." Pao's wife has no problems with this, as she is off meeting her ex-lover at the very same time. This is a typical scenario for most people of these hills.
Over time, however, the tradition has taken on a more modern feel. The young plan dates via text messages and take pictures on their mobiles. The village itself is more accessible because of new roads. 23-year-old Hua Thi Nghi, an ethnic Giay, says "The young generation now go out together and find each other, and it's more modern, freer and clearer. Back in the old days, our grandparents had to pursue love in secret, not like today."
The Khau Vai love market is now so popular that it has become a tourist attraction for domestic and foreign visitors. Some of the other activities at the festival are a trade-tourism fair and a performance on the ritual of rain-worship of the ethnic Lo Lo people. There is also a ceremony to receive the certificate recognizing the festival as an 'Intangible Cultural Heritage.' Folk games such as shuttlecock, Ferris wheel, see-saw and cock-fighting are a part of the love market as well. Local cuisine and the beautiful highland girls in their traditional costumes are an added attraction. Nowhere else in the world has an entire festival been created around the simple act of meeting one's ex-lover, with no awkwardness whatsoever.


text:
Food and Beverages
To keep buses clean and safe, any food or drink you bring on board must be in a closed container that is spill-proof. Coffee and other beverages can be consumed on board provided the beverage is carried in a sturdy container with a lid that will prevent the liquid from spilling. Open alcohol is not permitted on the bus.
Take your garbage with you when you leave the bus. We appreciate your help keeping the bus clean.


text:
Florence Campanile: Pisano Reliefs
Pisano, Andrea; Giotto
Download6A1-PAN-CB-I1_cp.jpg (544.9Kb)
West elevation (marble reliefs, in hexagons, second story): The creation of Adam; The foundation stone of the new campanile of Florence Cathedral was laid in April 1334. The lower third of the tower was built according to Giotto's plans, and the lower section of the socle and the first floor were carried out under his direction to 1337, but the remaining sections were built from 1337 to 1341 under Andrea Pisano (the middle and upper levels completed by 1359, by Francesco Talenti). According to the account of the contemporary Antonio Pucci, Andrea was dismissed after attempting to deviate from Giotto's plan, which suggests that he was not an architect. Both levels of the socle were decorated with reliefs, in a coherent iconographic programme. The lower zone (originally with the exception of the north side) bore reliefs with three scenes from Genesis followed by the trovatori del-l'arti [sic] (Ghiberti), the 'discoverers of the crafts', while cycles of the Planets, Virtues, the Liberal Arts and the Seven Sacraments decorated the upper socle zone. Source: Grove Art Online; http://www.groveart.com/ (accessed 12/2/2007)
Type of Work
bas-relief (sculpture)Subject
allegorical, Old Testament and Apocrypha, Medieval
Rights Statement
Licensed for educational and research use by the MIT community only


text:
Holiday sales rose 3 percent, below forecast: NRF
Shoppers spent only 3 percent more during the 2012 holiday season than they did a year earlier, the National Retail Federation said on Tuesday, citing economic uncertainty for tempering consumers' enthusiasm.
The NRF's data, based on U.S. government figures, fell short of the trade group's own forecast, which called for a 4.1 percent jump. In 2011, such sales rose a stronger 5.6 percent. The NRF looks at U.S. sales from November and December excluding automobiles, gasoline stations and restaurants.
After a strong showing over the Thanksgiving weekend in late November, when many consumers start their Christmas shopping, their willingness to spend was dented by concerns about the sluggish pace of job recovery and the possibility of higher taxes.
"The larger impact is simply the fact that the economy has been growing slowly, employment has been growing slowly and consumers are still in a deleveraging mode," said Ira Kalish, Director of global economics at Deloitte Research, noting that many Americans are giving priority to paying down their debt.
Total spending during the holiday season rose to $579.8 billion, the NRF said.
Non-store sales, which are mostly online, rose 11.1 percent. The group had forecast online sales growth of 12 percent. Non-store sales were not included in the 3 percent figure.
The NRF will issue its 2013 forecast next week. Many analysts and economists are not expecting a big jump, with consumption likely to be curbed by the recent 2 percentage point increase in payroll taxes that is leaving consumers with less money in their paychecks.
"Heading into 2013, consumers could continue to think twice about their discretionary purchases as they face decreases in their paychecks and other concerns with their household budgets," said NRF Chief Economist Jack Kleinhenz.
The trade group also called on U.S. lawmakers to put their differences aside and work on improving the level of employment. The U.S. unemployment rate stands at 7.8 percent.
Earlier on Tuesday, the U.S. Commerce Department reported that its broader measure of U.S. retail sales rose 0.5 percent in December, after rising 0.4 percent in November. That was better than the 0.2 percent increase expected by economists polled by Reuters.
(Reporting by Phil Wahba and Jessica Wohl in New York; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Tim Dobbyn)


text:
Create a Website Account - Manage notification subscriptions, save form progress and more.
Yes. You will need to file a Business License Application. You are required to submit a copy of your IRS form 501c indication your eligibility for nonprofit status.
The business license tax is waived.
A renewal form will be mailed each year in July. The form is required to be signed and returned to verify the business is still operating. A new business license will be mailed upon receipt of the renewal form. No business license tax will be due for renewal.
Show All Answers
We accept business licenses via online, mail or in person Monday through Friday 8a.m.-5p.m. at 1225 Lincoln Way -Room 1. Fees can be paid by check, money order, cash, or credit card.
If your principal place of business is in the City of Auburn, but in a home and/or apartment you will need to complete a Home Occupation Permit. If you are renting and are not the homeowner, you will need a signature on the Home Occupation Application from the owner/landlord verifying that they have given you permission to use the residence for your business.
Home Occupation Permit Application: $11.00
Duplicate/Reprint License: $1.00
Business License Tax: See Business License Fee Schedule 33.025 in the Auburn Municipal Code
If you are applying for a business license and your business is Massage, you will need to provide a copy of your State of California Certificate and CAMTC ID. If you do not have a CAMTC Certification then your license will fall under the Auburn Municipal Code Chapter 112 Massage Establishments and Technicians
For address or owner change you will need to complete a new Business License Application and submit it with a $1 fee.
Please check the box on the upper right hand side of the form indicating "change of location" or "change of address."
If your business name changed you will need to apply for a new business license, including all associated fees. The old business license will be closed.
We allow a 30-day grace period from the business license expiration date to renew without penalty. After the 30-day grace period, there is a 10% penalty fee assessed for each month your license is delinquent up to a maximum penalty of 50%.
For annual renewals, penalties will be imposed if payment is not received by July 31.
Month of August 10%
Month of September, additional 10%
Month of October, additional 10%
Month of November, additional 10%
Month of December, additional 10%
Maximum penalty is 50%
If you renewal form shows Rate Type: Gross Receipts, you will need to use the instructions on the Business License Renewal Notice to determine your business license tax due. Incomplete forms will be returned.
All other rate types are a flat rate and have the amount due clearly printed on the form.
Yes, Go to our website and follow the instructions using your renewal form. Your account number is your license number and the online renewal PIN # is located at the top of your renewal form. We accept credit cards.
Your City of Auburn business license allows you to conduct business in the City of Auburn. Contact the other jurisdictions in question regarding their business license requirements.
Yes. Even if you conduct business on a part-time or limited time basis, you are required to obtain a business license.
Yes. You should receive a renewal notice in the mail. If you do not receive a renewal notice, please contact our office at (530)823-4211 Ext 142.
If you have received a renewal form there is a box in the upper right section of the form where you can indicate that you are no longer doing business in the City. Fill out the date closed, sign and return to the address on the renewal form or you may fax it to 530-823-4209. If you do not have a renewal form, please contact our office at 530-823-4211 Ext 142


text:
- Home
- Your Government
- Departments A - O
- County Attorney
- Departments
- Victim Offender Conferencing Program
- Your Turn (Your Participation)
Your Turn (Your Participation)
Facts (About Your Participation)
- All participants in a VOC proceeding are required to sign this Participation Agreement as well as the VOC Confidentiality Agreement (PDF). By signing these documents, you agree that you understand the process and waive any objection to any of the terms thereof.
- The VOC asks that all communications between participants throughout the conference process remain confidential. It is asked that parties not share any oral or written information presented during the conference with anyone not present at the proceedings (i.e. family members, neighbors, etc.). This request is separate from, but in addition to the Kentucky statutes and case laws governing this process mentioned in the VOC Confidentiality Agreement (PDF). The VOC confidentiality principle stated here was created to promote open communication between parties and facilitate the settlement disputes. The Henderson County Attorney's Office / VOC bears no responsibility for enforcement, if a party breaches this good faith confidentiality agreement.
- Victims are free to withdraw from the proceedings at any time. Withdrawal is discouraged. It is our belief that even though it is a difficult task to express and hear each other's feelings and concerns, it can be very beneficial to resolve the situation. We ask that you enter the process committed to open discussion.
- Minors must discuss withdrawal with their CDW before withdrawing from the VOC process.
- Any participant who wishes to bring a witness, attorney, or any other person, who is not a party to the dispute, must receive prior authorization from the VOC Coordinator handling their case prior to the scheduled mediation. These "invitees" would not have a direct role in the VOC Conference. Parties have the right to have an attorney present during the VOC Conference process; however, the conference is not a judicial proceeding. The other party must agree to any additional persons attending the proceeding who do not have a direct connection to the crime. VOC Coordinators may prevent witnesses, attorneys and others from participating in the conference if the other party did not agree in advance, or if the VOC Coordinator did not authorize their presence.
- Unless specifically scheduled to participate, please do not bring children to the proceedings.
There is a moral factor and a legal factor.
- The moral part includes an understanding that any discussion of the process with people, who aren't directly involved in the conference, and not present at the conference, endangers the entire effort. If that happened, participants would be less willing to be open and honest.
- The legal part includes Kentucky Rule of Evidence§408. Anything discussed, prepared for, or written during the conference cannot be used later in court as evidence unless specifically agreed to by the parties.
- VOC Confidentiality Agreements (PDF) are reviewed and signed during the first interview meeting.


text:
15 Underrated Country Songs Released in 2020
There are 365 days in a year, and yet, at the end of each one, we can't help but think: So many songs, so little time.
It'll come as no surprise to most, but if you're only listening to what's on the country charts, you're missing out; heck, if you're only listening to artists' singles, you're missing out! We've heard plenty of great songs in heavy rotation in 2020, but there's great reward for those willing to dig a little deeper.
Ashley McBryde's "One Night Standards" and "Martha Divine" are great -- but if you skipped her full sophomore album, you haven't heard one of the year's best tearjerkers. Even if you've heard Ingrid Andress' Lady Like from front to back, you might not have heard her summertime jam. Didn't play Brett Eldredge or Keith Urban's latest records all the way through? You've gotta go give those final few songs a listen.
But it's not too late! Pause the Christmas music for a little bit before the clock strikes midnight on Jan. 1, 2021, and give these underrated and overlooked songs a listen. As with our list of the Top 20 Country Songs of 2020, staff opinions and song integrity were taken into account when picking these 15 tracks. Also, only songs released in 2020 were considered -- so, as much as our team adores Lainey Wilson's "Things a Man Oughta Know," it didn't qualify.


text:
Dianna Agron Up For Spider-Man Love Interest, Plus Philip Seymour Hoffman For Venom?
The hunt for Spider-Man's love interest continues, and contrary to what we heard before, Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane may both be in the picture in Sony's reboot. Deadline is reporting that Glee's Dianna Agron and Georgina Haig have been added to the list of love interest contenders, which already includes Mia Wasikowska, Dominique McElligott, and the previously reported Emma Stone. As always the list could change, but Deadline says these are the five most likely candidates to smooch Andrew Garfield in his Spidey costume. And since Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson are both part of the new story, they could pick the actresses for both roles off this shortlist.
Oh and at the end of the article Deadline drops a pretty major rumor bomb-- "early unconfirmed talk" says they want to bring back Venom as a villain and they're eyeing Philip Seymour Hoffman. It's unclear from the writing if Hoffman would be playing Venom or another character entirely; in the comics Venom hasn't just been embodied by Eddie Brock, the character played by Topher Grace who became Venom in Spider-Man 3. It's possible that Hoffman is playing some version of Brock very different from Grace's version-- a smart move for a reboot-- or an entirely different character taken over by the Venom symbiote. Yes, I had to look that up.
This feels an awful lot like 2008, when Batman 3 rumors were in their infancy and Michael Caine was campaigning for Hoffman to play the Penguin. This Venom rumor may or may not be any more solid, but it's equally annoying. Can't we get the love interest out of the way before the villain casting derby starts taking over our lives?
Your Daily Blend of Entertainment News
Staff Writer at CinemaBlend
Most Popular
By Laura Hurley
By Mike Reyes
By Mick Joest
By Laura Hurley
By Mick Joest
By Mick Joest


text:
01 January 2013
Mexican Narcoterrorist Region May Abandon Catholicism for Islam
It would seem as if Bishop Ruiz's brand of Liberation Theology has had the same effect on Chiapas as on Europe. Chiapas is poor, but it's now also
appearing to trend Islamic as any region under the influence of the left eventually does. When you kill the local religion and replace it with social justice, foreign religions eventually take its place.
In the mid-1990s, a leftist resistance group which calls itself The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) made Chiapas its home. Its attempts to fight the Mexican Army repeatedly failed, but the Zapatistas are still very active in the district's rural areas. Chiapas is considered a dangerous place, where every home has an arms arsenal of its own; and like many other places in Mexico, Chiapas' streets have become the battlefield where the government and local drug lords wrestle for dominance.
Chiapas, however, harbors an even more sinister secret: It is also a hub of radical Islamist activity.
Catholic Mexico is in the midst of a crisis of faith. According to a local businessman, who asked to remain anonymous, it is widely believed that within a decade, Chiapas will be the first federal state in Mexico to turn its back on the Church.
"The Muslim missionaries are very active there," he said. "It's hard to know exactly how many people have converted to Islam over the past few years."
In December 2011, the US authorities released an indictment filed against Lebanese drug lord Ayman Juma, which exposed Hezbollah's involvement with the Los Zetas drug cartel. According to the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Los Zetas is the most technologically advanced and most dangerous cartel operating in Mexico.
Juma was indicted in absentia for smuggling 85 tons of cocaine into the US and for laundering $850 million for Los Zetas. He was also accused of serving as a go-between for the Mexican crime syndicate and the Shiite terror group.
According to US officials, for a modest 8%-14% commission, Juma's money laundering process would take about a week. The operation involved bank accounts in dozens of countries, making it virtually impossible to track the dirty money.
US intelligence concluded that Hezbollah has established sleeper cells, intelligence infrastructure and training bases in Mexico and other South American countries. The Shiite group is also helping the drug lords build smuggling tunnels under the US-Mexico border and satellite images show that they are nearly identical to the maze of tunnels running under the Gaza-Egypt border.
Hezbollah is also training the cartels' operatives in the dubious art of explosives, helping drug lords improve their bomb-making skills.
23:35 Posted in Real Islam | Permalink | Comments (0) | Facebook |
The comments are closed.


text:
"In Holland, we have two words for design. One is vormgeving; in German formgeben. And the other word is ontwerpen; in German entwurf. In the Anglo-Saxon language there's only one word for design, which is design. That is something you should work out. Vormgeving is more to make things look nice. So for instance, packaging for a perfume or for chocolate in order to make things fashionable, obsolete and therefore bad for society because we don't really need it. While ontwerpe means, and the Anglo-saxon word, but its stronger, means engineering. That means you as a person try to invent a new thing—which is intelligent, which is clever, and which will have a long-life. And that's called stylistic durability. It means you can use it for a long time."
— Gert Dumbar
(via frankchimero)


text:
Determining Relevance: How Similarity Is Scored
The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Determining Relevance
When a user submits a query to a search engine, the first thing it must do is determine which pages in the index are related to the query and which are not. Throughout this post, I will refer this as the "relevance" problem. More formally, we can state it as follows:
Given a search query and a document, compute a relevance score that measures the similarity between the query and document.
The "document" in this context can also refer to things like the title tag, the meta description, incoming anchor text, or anything else that we think might help determine whether the query is related to the page. Practically, a search engine computes a number of relevance scores using different page elements and weights them all to arrive at one final score.
The relevance problem has been extremely well studied in the research community. The first papers go back several decades, and it is still an active area of research. In this post, I focus on the most influential approaches that have stood the test of time.
Relevance vs Ranking
Conceptually, we can separate relevance determination from ranking the relevant documents, even if they are implemented as a single step inside a search engine. In this mental framework, the relevance step first makes a binary (True/False) decision for each page, then the ranking step orders the documents to return to the user.I'll present some data later in this post that vividly illustrates this split and how it relates to different ranking signals.
Query and Document Models
Translating the query and document from raw strings into something we can do computation with is the first hurdle in computing a similarity score. To do so, we make use of "query models" and "document models." The "models" here are just a fancy way of saying that the strings are represented in some other way that makes computation possible.
The above image illustrates this process for the query "philadelphia phillies" and the Wikipedia page about the Phillies. The final step in computing the similarity score runs the query and document representations through a scoring function.
Query Models
The following image illustrates some different types of query models:
The building blocks at the bottom include things like tokenization (splitting the string into words), word normalization (such as stemming where common word endings are removed), and spelling correction (if a query contains a misspelled word, the search engine corrects it and returns results for the corrected word).
Built on top of these building blocks are things like query classification and intent. If the search engine determines that a particular query is time sensitive it will return news results, or if it thinks the query intent is transactional it will display shopping results.
Finally, at the top of the pyramid are more abstract representations of the query such as entity extraction or latent topic representations (LDA). Indeed, Google knows that the "philadelphia phillies" are a major league baseball team and since it is baseball season returns last night's score at the top of the search results (in addition to the knowledge graph on the right).
Document Models
Like query models, there are several different types of document models commonly used in search.
TF-IDF is one of the oldest and most well known approaches that represents each query and document as a vector and uses some variant of the cosine similarity as the scoring function. A language model encodes some information about the statistics of a language and includes knowledge such as the phrase "search engine optimization" is much more common then "search engine walking." Language models are used heavily in machine translation and speech recognition, among other applications. They are also extremely useful in information retrieval. Yet another class of models uses the probability ranking principle, which directly models the probability of relevance given the query and document. Of these, Okapi BM25 has been shown to be particularly effective.
Correlation study
By now, you are probably wondering if search engines actually use any of these things, and if so, which ones are the most important. To explore this, we designed a correlation study similar to ones we have run in the past (see this for some background on the general approach). In this case, we collected the top 50 results from Google-US for about 14,000 keywords. This resulted in about 600,000 pages that we then crawled and used to compute a number of different similarity scores.
As you can see, the language model approach performed the best with a mean Spearman correlation of 0.10, consistent with results published in the research literature.
If we do some stemming of both the query and document first and recompute, the correlations increase slightly across the board:
This suggests that Google is indeed doing some type of word normalization or stemming in their relevance calculation.
Relevance vs Ranking revisited
Comparing these correlations vs Page Authority (an aggregate in-link metric in our Mozscape index) on the same data set, we see a substantial difference:
This begs the question: if these sophisticated similarity scores are so useful, why aren't the correlations higher? The answer lies in the conceptual relevance vs ranking split I discussed earlier.
To convince myself, I constructed an experiment as illustrated below:
To run the experiment, I first took 450 random pages from our dataset stratified across the top 50 results (so that they include nine #1 ranked pages, nine #2 ranked pages, etc.). Then I added the 450 random pages to the top 50 pages in each search result to make one group of 500 pages for each keyword. Since 50 of these pages are in the search result, and 450 are not, 10% of them are relevant to the keyword and 90% are not (the assumption here is that if the page appears in a Google search then it is relevant). Then for each keyword, I collected the Page Authority and Language Model similarity score and sorted by each (the tables in the middle).
Finally, I computed the Precision at 50, which is the percentage of the top 50 results sorted by PA/Language Model score that are actually in the search result. This directly measures the extent to which PA or the Language Model can separate relevant from irrelevant pages. Since 10% of the 500 documents are in the search result, we can achieve a 10% precision by randomly sorting them. This 10% precision is our baseline (bottom gray bars in the image).
The results are striking. The PA precision is very close to the baseline, which says that is does no better then a random number at determining relevance even though it does do a good job at ranking the top 50 once they are known to be relevant. On the other hand, the Language Model precision is close to 100%. Put another way, the Language Model is nearly perfect in determining which of the 500 pages are in the search result, but does a poor job at actually ranking those relevant documents.
This type of query-document similarity scoring is well established in the research literature and underlies every modern information retrieval system. As such, it is fundamental to search and is immune to algorithm change.
Since search engines use sophisticated query and document models, there is no need to optimize separately for similar keywords. For example, any page targeting "movie reviews" will also target "movie review."
Finally, you can use the conceptual split between relevance and ranking in your workflow. When creating or modifying existing content, first concentrate on making the page relevant to a broad set related keywords. Then concentrate on increasing the search position.
More Ranking Factors results coming soon
These are the first results we've released from the 2013 Ranking Factors project. As in years past, the project includes both an industry survey and large correlation study. I'll be presenting the results at MozCon this year (so get your tickets if you haven't already!), and we'll be following it up with a full report sometime later this summer.
To dig deeper
Here are all the slides from my SMX Advanced talk:
I highly recommend the book Introduction to Information Retrieval by Manning et al. It is available for free online reading from their site and provides a comprehensive description of everything discussed in this post (and much, much more). In particular, see Chapters 2, 6, 11 and 12.
Thanks for reading. I look forward to continuing the discussion in the comments below!


text:
And it blames the economic meltdown in the kingdom for this.
In an extraordinary claim it goes on to say that Swaziland has a 'small and vulnerable' economy that has been exposed to 'external shocks'. This it says, 'had historically diminished the ability of the government to efficiently underwrite some of the human rights that have financial implications.'
The government, handpicked by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa's last absolute monarch, did not explain how, for example, abolishing the death penalty, stopping the corporal punishment of children and given women their rights would cost money for the government.
The excuse for not giving the Swazi people their human rights is contained in a report from the United Nations this week.
The report is an unedited draft of the findings of the UN Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review into human rights in Swaziland. The review took place on 4 October 2011.
The claims are part of the Swaziland Government's response to criticisms made by a number of nations about Swaziland's poor record on human rights. Chief Mgwagwa Gamedze, then acting (now confirmed) Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, headed the Swaziland delegation at the review.
During the review, nations lined up to point out the failing in Swaziland's human rights record.
Here are some of the comments published in the report.
Switzerland 'expressed alarm by the many allegations of extra-judicial executions and tortures committed by the security forces and stated that victims should receive justice. It noted that there were no political parties because of existing restrictions and that there were few private media organisations.'
Norway expressed 'concern at the systematic violations of freedom of assembly and association in Swaziland, including by suppression of political parties. Norway expressed grave concern at the reports of forceful disruptions o f peaceful marches, rallies and protests, including through the use of violence and arbitrary detention. It was alarmed at the extensive use of pre-trial detention, ill-treatments and alleged torture by police custody.'
France 'expressed concern at the use by authorities of the law [Suppression of Terrorism Act] 2008 on the repression of terrorism, to restrict freedom of expression'.
China noted there was 'still presence of gender inequality'.
India 'encouraged Swaziland to enhance women's empowerment'.
Canada 'expressed concern at the continuing ban of political parties and the lack of democratic space to exercise freedom of expression and association. Canada also expressed concern at the reports of excessive use of force, arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial executions.'
Hungary stated, 'Swaziland retained the death penalty in its statute books. Also, freedom of assembly and association were severely restricted.'
Ghana 'noted the discriminatory practices against women persisting in Swaziland. It also noted the continuing allegations of arrest and detention following peaceful protest actions.'
Slovakia noted 'that there were allegations of police employing interrogation methods contravening to constitutional provision. Slovakia expressed concern about reported restrictions concerning the freedom of expression such as the Proscribed Publications Act and the Suppression of Terrorism Act.'
Australia 'urged Swaziland to take steps to reduce the high rates of chronic malnutrition and mortality for children under-five; and to abolish the death penalty and corporal punishment. It expressed concerns about the over-crowding and poor conditions in prisons.'
Germany 'noted the restrictions in freedom of expression, in particular the Proscribed Publications Act.'
Slovenia 'remained concerned about reports of discriminatory practices against women. It asked about the necessary measures taken to effectively ensure gender equality.'
Brazil 'was concerned about the persistence of discrimination against women, and restrictions to civil and political rights. Brazil encouraged Swaziland to pursue constitutional reforms.'
The United States 'requested how Swaziland planned to ensure protection of freedom of assembly, association and expression. It called on Swaziland to protect the rights of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people.'
Sweden 'noted that domestic legislation needed to be harmonised with the 2006 Constitution and the international human rights law. Sweden was concerned that the independence of the National Commission for Human Rights and Public Administration was questioned and its powers remained unclear.'
To read the full report, click here. http://www.scribd.com/doc/71169263


text:
Research and development at maxon.
At maxon, research and development (R&D) is the basis for future viability.
The R&D activities of maxon are directed toward the requirements of the market and the customer. When the combination of standard products does not suffice, we develop custom designs. These can either be product modifications or new developments. Cooperation with institutes of higher education and universities around the world ensures that our drive systems meet the demands of new technology.
maxon has R&D departments both at the headquarters in Sachseln (Switzerland) and at the subsidiary in Sexau (Germany). In addition to continuous product development, these departments are responsible for ongoing improvement of manufacturing processes and production and testing systems. Over 8% of the revenue flows into R&D, where more than 200 employees work.
Our core areas of expertise include:
- Five winding technologies for precision DC motors
- Standard and special gearhead engineering
- Encoder technology
- Electronics and system technology
- Injection molding processes for plastics as well as ceramic and metal powder (CIM/MIM)
- Installation and automation technology
- Development and project management
- Quality management


text:
Apartment Ocean & Golf - ANG2321
Holiday rentals | Lovely apartment in beautiful Basque-style detached house located in the heart of the residential area of Chiberta. Peaceful area. Beaches, surfing schools and the shops of the Cinq Cantons area are a short walk away.
Nearby facilities include cycle paths, a forest and a fitness trail, horse-riding centre, golf course and thalassotherapy centre.
Two bedrooms: one has one double bed and the second has two slightly smaller single beds. Shower room with shower. Washing machine. Separate toilets. Large living room with fully-fitted open-plan kitchen adjoining the lounge and patio, featuring combination microwave oven, induction cooker, fridge-freezer, capsule coffee machine. Safe for valuables. Free WiFi. Patio with garden furniture set and plancha grill. French bowls (pétanque) court. Sheets and household linen supplied. Cleaning services can be provided if desired (fee payable). Allocated indoor parking space.
Capacity : 4 persons
Area : 65 m²
Weekly rates:
First fortnight of July: 1050 € / Second fortnight of July: 1250 € / August: 1250 € / September: 1050 €


text:
Happy New Year!
It's time for my 6th annual cycling challenge.
2009 results here.
#1 – Climb 100 Different Cols
Yes, the same main goal as 2009. It's what I like to do: Explore the mountains while cycling uphill.
Climb at least 100 different Cols (mountain passes) or other big climbs.*
– At least 20 Cols over 2000 metres
– At least 30 new climbs (it's getting very hard to find new stuff near home)
– Repeat climbs won't count, but the other side of big climbs is fine.
– little Cols won't count although I'll track them 😉
Along with the usual big climbs near me, I hope to get back to the French Pyrénées and the Dolomites in Italy.
* For example, Alpe d'Huez isn't a pass but it would count.
#2 – One Metric Century per Month
This is a bit harder than it sounds as there aren't really flat rides here.
And given that before June 2007 I had NEVER done a metric century, this should keep me a little tense. I have a few good 80 and 90 kilometre loops that will need to be lengthened. 😉
Somehow in 2005 I cycled 10,000 kms without even once doing a 100 km ride
#3 – Cycle La Marmotte (again!?!?)
Update: Success!
Yikes. I am a little scared of this idea, but have already registered – and I am too cheap to not show up.
By far the toughest ride of my life was the 2008 La Marmotte. 174 kilometres and 5000 metres vertical. Col de la Croix de Fer, Col du Galibier via Télégraphe, and then the "easiest"
climb of the day: Alpe d'Huez.
The difficulty is daunting enough, but equally for me, the 40+ kilometre descent from Galibier to the base of Alpe d'Huez through 10 tunnels is terrifying.
Training for this should keep me motivated.
I am hoping that some of my cycling partners will sign up as well (hint, hint).
As preparation, I have also signed up for "La Ventoux" in early June. Update: Race report.
#4 – Weight Goal
No Comment! 😉
A Big Thanks!
I just wanted to again say a big "Thanks" to Doreen and everyone else that has tolerated my "Challenges" and given me so much encouragement.
These silly challenges keep me motivated, fitter and (generally) cheerful.
I have accumulated an ever growing collection of memorable experiences. And the best memories are those achieved with friends.


text:
Tuning thermal PID loops
When dealing with critical temperature applications, PID controllers are a common regulatory approach, but tuning these often requires a different strategy than other types of loops. Auto-tuning features can help if you understand them.
If you are responsible for working with PID temperature controllers, you have probably already discovered that such loops can be challenging and that the needs of a given controller and application can vary widely. This discussion is intended to help explain how these controllers work and to offer some basic guidance on dealing with a PID temperature controller. We've done our best to avoid unnecessary jargon while providing basic terminology and definitions that will be helpful when referencing controller manuals and other sources. Bear in mind, though, that controllers vary and applications vary, and we would be remiss if we lead you to believe that our experiences cover all cases or that our advice never goes wrong. Please be careful to consider the unique circumstances of your application as you implement any changes.
Why tune controllers?
For optimal results, a PID controller needs to know how much to adjust the heat to achieve a desired temperature change, and how long the temperature takes to react to a change in heater power. Tuning teaches the controller the characteristics of a particular system. The controller captures what it learns in its PID settings. The exact names of the PID settings depend on the controller manufacturer, but they typically are: proportional band or gain, integral or reset, and derivative or rate. Consult the manual to find the PID settings in your controller. The controller cannot know the best values for these parameters until it is tuned because every system is different.
When poorly tuned, the temperature can oscillate around the setpoint, be slow to respond to changes, or overshoot the setpoint excessively at start-up or the when the setpoint changes. This impacts productivity by making operators wait, reduces yield, and increases premature failures when products are processed at the wrong temperature.
How do you tune a PID controller?
The simplest way to tune a PID controller is to use its auto-tune feature. Nearly all electronic temperature controllers now have one, but they don't all work the same way. To find out how to best use your controller's auto-tune, read its manual or call its manufacturer. Some controllers tune while the load heats up from ambient. Some tune around setpoint. Either way, auto tuning adjusts the PID settings automatically, so you don't have to. But before you engage that feature, consider these options and implications:
- The temperature may overshoot setpoint while tuning. Controllers that tune near setpoint force the temperature to go up and down. To limit the temperature, set a lower setpoint and observe the tuning behavior. You can tune again at a higher setpoint after confirming that tuning won't cause the temperature to go too high.
- There is probably a time limit on the auto tune function, so very slow processes may not tune. Check the PID settings prior to and after tuning. If they do not change, the auto tuning process failed for one reason or another. That's a good time to get help from the controller's manufacturer.
- Defining what is considered good tuning depends on the process. Some controllers have options that customize auto tuning results for your process. For example, certain Watlow controllers allow you to select whether the temperature should get to setpoint in the minimum amount of time with a bit of overshoot, or approach setpoint more cautiously to minimize or eliminate overshoot.
To get the best results when tuning, make sure conditions are like those at which the system will normally function. Here are our tips for a successful auto-tune implementation:
- Set the setpoint before starting the auto-tune process.
- Make sure the system's temperature is stable before starting.
- Tune the system at the time and location at which it will be used. Tuning in a lab on a summer day in California may not yield the results necessary to control well on a winter night in Minnesota.
- Tune with the same heater voltage to be used in operation. If the heaters use 240 Vac when tuning but 208 Vac when installed at the user's site, the controller will likely have to be tuned again since the change in power will change the way the heaters perform.
- Tune with actual product or a reasonable simulation in place. An oven full of metal parts tunes differently than an empty one.
- Tune fully assembled and installed systems. A machine with its cover panels off can perform differently when covered.
- Consider all the sources of heat. A batch of powered circuit cards in a test oven can significantly change the way it tunes.
- Consider all the heat sinks. Imagine installing the first machine in a line where several will share the exhaust duct. If the vents that will connect to the other machines are closed when you tune the first machine, the cooling effects of the exhaust may be much greater than after the other machines are installed and operating.
- Consider the range of temperatures at which you want the system to perform well, and tune at the highest, lowest, and midpoint; or at each operating temperatures if there are not too many. Make a record of the PID settings resulting from each trial; controllers typically overwrite the previous settings each time you tune. If the trials all control well, use the widest proportional band (lowest gain), the least active integral (lowest repeats per minute or highest minutes per repeat) and the least active derivative (typically the smallest number).
- When multiple temperatures are controlled and the heat from one can affect another, for controllers that tune at setpoint, tune the loops one at a time with the other loops stable at setpoint. For a controller that tunes while heating from ambient, it may be best to tune the loops simultaneously.
- If product and heat flows from one temperature control zone to another in a conveyor oven, for example, tune the loops in that order.
When is it well tuned?
The system is tuned well when it heats up and settles quickly at setpoint and when the temperature settles at a new setpoint without oscillating excessively. Of course, quickly and excessively are relative terms, and as noted above, some processes tolerate a little overshoot, allowing the system to change temperature in the minimum time, and others do not. In a system that tolerates some overshoot, we look for responses like those shown in the graphs. For us, the key indicator of a well-tuned system is not just that the temperature is stable, but that the output power is also stable—it should not hunt or oscillate more than a few percent.
Use software such as SpecView to graph the temperature, setpoint, and percent heat power. With a graph you can quantify performance by measuring time to setpoint, time to stabilize, and oscillation amplitude, if any. This allows you to measure if the tuning meets your needs.
If auto tuning doesn't work
If the temperature does not perform to your satisfaction, consider these possibilities:
- Was auto tuning performed under ideal conditions? Review our tips above. If something was not right, correct it and try auto-tuning again.
- When the temperature is at setpoint, if the heat power is not between 10% and 90%, look for a problem such as missing covers or a failed heater. Otherwise, there may be issues with the design or installation.
- If the heat is at 100% and the temperature doesn't increase or never reaches setpoint, shut the heat off and check that the sensor is positioned and connected correctly. Otherwise, try to determine why there is not enough heating power or why there is too much cooling. Tuning is probably not the problem.
- If the temperature is oscillating, is it due to the power switching method? If the frequency of the oscillation is the same as the time proportioning cycle time, reduce the cycle time setting if your relay allows it, or replace the relay with a solid-state power controller that allows much faster switching.
- If the performance is poor because the operating conditions change too dramatically for PID control to adapt, consider using adaptive tuning if your controller offers it.
Switching to manual
If you still need to make improvements, you can manually adjust the tuning. Providing detailed instructions on manually tuning PID control is beyond our scope here, but consider the following:
- If the temperature does not reach setpoint fast enough, you may be able to fix that, but you may have to tolerate a little overshoot and settling time.
- If it doesn't settle down fast enough, you may be able to fix that, but you may have to tolerate slower responses to setpoint changes.
- Adjust only one PID setting at a time.
- Make sure you know which way to adjust each parameter for the desired result.
- Double or halve the PID setting when making adjustments. With most controllers, small changes will have negligible effects.
- Change the setpoint to test the system's responsiveness.
- Wait long enough to see the results of each change before making another. How long to wait depends on how quickly the system can respond. Wait three or four cycles if it is oscillating.
- Graph the results each time you make a change and record the PID settings on the graph. This allows you to evaluate whether or not your changes are improvements.
- Graph the output power. If output power is oscillating, even if the temperature is stable, the system is probably not stable. Output power is as close to a crystal ball as you get, it tells you what the control system is trying to do before the heater makes it happen and before the system filters the results to the sensor.
We hope these suggestions will help improve the performance of your controllers. More extensive discussions of PID tuning strategy are available at Watlow's website.
Beyer is a technical support specialist for controllers and power switching devices with Watlow, where he has worked for 32 years. Wilkinson is a product manager for multi-loop controllers and software with Watlow, where he has worked for 15 years.
Download more detailed instructions on temperature loop tuning here.
Do you have experience and expertise with the topics mentioned in this content? You should consider contributing to our CFE Media editorial team and getting the recognition you and your company deserve. Click here to start this process.


text:
We are currently working on a book which is based on what we learned during the IKM Emergent Programme. Some drafts of parts of this can be found on the Challenging Ignorance page. We are also sharing related writings by ourselves and others on the Other Material page.
All materials produced by Emergent Works Ltd or, solely, by IKM Emergent are published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike License. This allows people and institutions to reproduce or to keep our material on their servers subject to certain conditions. If anyone is interested in making other use of what is here, please get in touch. IKM Emergent material co-published with others and other material shared through this site may be subject to different arrangements. Please check the 'Rights Information' section in the metadata about each document.
We want our work to be available to anyone who is interested in it. However, no one is currently contributing to the time and cost of its production. We therefore ask properly resourced institutions to buy what is offered on this site. Those that do so will receive a proper receipt in the course of the on-line transaction. Individuals are welcome to download and use our material for free although, if you are in a position to make one, a donation would be much appreciated.


text:
Clouds don't need real-time threat reporting tools to win federal stamp of approval
Providers slated to gain certifications to deliver Web-based services governmentwide by Dec. 31.
Cloud companies planning to apply in June for certification to sell Web services governmentwide will not be obligated to provide automated threat reports, the government's purchasing agency told Nextgov.
Until now, the Obama administration had expected agencies to outfit all information technology with "continuous monitoring" tools that feed risk indicators, such as unauthorized logins, to the Homeland Security Department.
The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, a cloud accreditation process, stipulated that Web-based IT providers supply agencies with these data feeds in a concept of operations released earlier this year.
But officials at the General Services Administration, which manages FedRAMP, are still figuring out how to compel real-time information sharing between private companies and agencies. With cloud computing, departments essentially outsource their IT to a commercial data center over which they have no control.
Despite the absence of guidance on automated surveillance, FedRAMP is anticipated to grant its first certifications by the end of December, GSA and the department's hired auditors said this week. The program will start accepting applications on June 6. Certified cloud services will be announced on FedRAMP.gov as authorizations are awarded, officials said. Accredited providers will receive directions on marketing their products with a FedRAMP logo and citing the distinction in press releases.
At the outset, companies will report on security controls periodically through manual reporting, GSA officials said. Homeland Security and GSA will provide a detailed roadmap for instituting data feeds, as both FedRAMP and continuous monitoring, in general, mature, they said.
GSA officials explained that while automated real-time reporting is not a must-have, internal real-time monitoring is. Cloud suppliers must constantly track the protection of government assets for their own record-keeping. Reports summarizing this surveillance will be submitted quarterly, bi-annually or annually, as opposed to fed live to the government directly.
GSA Associate Administrator Dave McClure and Mark Weatherford, DHS deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity, are expected to discuss these plans more in depth at a June 13 breakfast co-sponsored by Nextgov's parent organization Government Executive Media Group and the SANS Institute.
To cut costs and speed a federal shift to the cloud, agencies are supposed to use FedRAMP for verifying the security of cloud purchases. The Office of Management and Budget estimates the government in the past has spent $300 million annually on IT certification and accreditation activities, partly due to redundant assessments. FedRAMP is intended to bring Web services into compliance with a universal set of security standards so that any certified product will be safe for use at all agencies.
Once FedRAMP begins, one of nine GSA-approved, independent auditing bodies named earlier this month will examine whether a prospective service meets the uniform requirements -- once. Then, any agency can reuse the certification to immediately deploy the cloud product without paying for another examination.
Cloud providers owning just a few servers could pass muster within 30 days, according to some of the chosen assessors. Computer racks at technology giants such as Amazon could take up to three months to inspect, unless the company has a dedicated enclave for federal customers, they added.
Competition for FedRAMP logos is expected to be high. "It's been a week and we've gotten a lot of calls and emails from service providers," said Paul Nguyen, vice president of cyber solutions for auditor Knowledge Consulting Group, estimating the number of inquiries to be about 15.
"This is one of the most public-facing programs for people who want to work with the government -- they all want to be FedRAMP-certified." Nguyen said his 250-person company should be able to handle the initial interest. More assessors will be added on a rolling basis, GSA officials said.
Cloud vendors are responsible for covering inspection expenses. Fees can range from $20,000 to more than $200,000, depending on the size and complexity of the firm's computing facility, according to some auditors.
Several agencies, such as NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, already are drafting contract solicitations that favor FedRAMP-approved firms, even though there aren't any yet.
The pace of a review largely will depend on the candidate's legwork in conforming with up to 300 blanket controls, inspectors predicted.
"It really becomes a question of how prepared the cloud service providers are," said Todd Coen, vice president of auditor DRC's homeland security solutions division. If a firm is ready to demonstrate compatibility with the safeguards, DRC could compile an assessment packet for the government within two and a half months, he said.
"By the end of summer, early fall, we should definitely start seeing those packages coming," Coen said.
While cloud providers appear interested in participating, it's less clear whether all agencies trust the process enough to use it.
"I still think there is a healthy skepticism in the market for cloud in general," Coen said.
But he noted an interagency panel, the Joint Authorization Board, which signs off on final audited products, includes experts from agencies with high standards, including the Defense Department.
"I don't think there is anything covert about the fact that they chose folks like DHS and DoD to be the main players on the JAB," Coen said. "My sense is that if you can get these guys to agree on what would give them the sense that their data would be secure -- that they would want to use these packages. If you can save money when times are very tight, this is a great way to do it."
Clarification: This story has been updated with newer information and to clarify that internal real-time monitoring is still necessary for cloud service providers seeking government certification.
(Image via SCOTTCHAN /Shutterstock.com)


text:
Francis Drake
Francis Drake (c1542-1596), English seaman, trader, pirate, politician and circumnavigator, was born near Tavistock, a town in Devon on the western edge of Dartmoor, about 19 km (12miles) north of Plymouth. His father, Edmund, a prosperous shearer, had become a priest but the identity of his mother is uncertain. The ban on clerical marriage during this time of the reign of the Catholic Mary I almost certainly means that Francis was born illegitimate.
He was a cousin of John Hawkins and it was in the Plymouth household of John's father, a prosperous merchant and occasional pirate, that he grew up and in whose ships he learnt both his nautical skills and trading acumen. Through the 1560s he participated in slave trading voyages to Africa and by 1567 had been given his first command – of the Judith in one of John Hawkins' three sided voyages to Africa, the Caribbean and back to England. The enterprise was to end in rancour between the two men when, after a fight with the Spaniards, Drake sailed home in the undamaged Judith, leaving Hawkins to an uncertain fate. Over the next few years Drake was to visit the Caribbean at various times – by now piracy seemed to be more important than trade – and whilst he was not always successful, his reputation grew, both at home and with the Spaniards who had begun calling him El Draque. (The Dragon.)
He seemed the obvious man to be chosen to lead an expedition to harry and plunder Spain's relatively undefended American Pacific flank, with the added possibility of finding the western end of the Northwest Passage. The high possibility of great profit from the silver-rich Spanish dominions meant that many of the high and powerful in England, including (secretly) Elizabeth I herself had invested in the enterprise.
Five ships left Plymouth in December 1577. Before they had reached the Cape Verde Islands they had captured several Portuguese ships, taking booty and what provisions they thought necessary, had swapped one of their smaller vessels for a much larger Portuguese ship and had kidnapped its Portuguese captain, a man with knowledge of South American waters. They reached Brazil in early April and, some weeks later, they arrived at San Julian Bay in Patagonia where, like Magellan before him, he wintered. (And where, like Magellan, he was faced with mutiny that ended in the execution of a second-in-command.)
With winter over and with the fleet now down to three ships, they entered the Straits of Magellan. They passed through in only a fortnight; but three days into the Pacific a storm hit which sank one ship and separated the other two. In the three weeks of the gale, Drake was blown southeast into what is now known as Drake Passage between Cape Horn and the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica. By now, Drake had renamed his ship - the Pelican became the Golden Hind(e). Ever the realist, Drake had realised that, whatever the outcome of the adventure, it would not do him any harm to name his ship after the crest of the ship's owner, Sir Christopher Hatton, then Captain of the Queen's Guard.
Drake commenced his foray up the Pacific coast of South America. Between October 1578 and June 1579, the Golden Hind and a small pinnace, put together from a "kit" brought from England, sailed from the southern coast of Patagonia to about the latitude of Seattle. They fell upon a coast completely unprepared for a predator. The ships they came across were mostly unarmed, at least had no major ordinance; the towns and villages undefended; the people utterly surprised when the ship they assumed to be friendly turned out to be English. Examples of this unpreparedness include the farcical example of the English coming across a Spaniard asleep beside his mules carrying 13 bars of silver. In another instance they relieved an unfortunate Spaniard of 800 pounds' weight of silver from his llama train. The Spaniards had not seen the need for armed protection for deliveries of silver from the mines to the coast for shipment to Panama where armed escort began as it was carried across the isthmus to await the next convoy to Spain.
He also came across a "treasure ship" which he relieved of 13 chests of pieces of eight, 26 tons of silver, 80 pounds' weight in gold plus various items of plate and jewellery. The Golden Hind was bursting - it had gold bullion for ballast.
An interesting point can be made here: although perhaps up to 20 English were killed during the raids, mostly from small arms fire, not one Spaniard died . Drake was proud of this. His men made a lot of noise and there was a lot of shot and shouting but (the shot at least) was all over the heads of the defenders or aimed at the rigging of the ships attacked. Even when he heard off thePeruvian coast that 16 Protestants (read Englishmen) had recently been burnt at the stake in Lima he refused to be unnecessarily violent .
Drake chose to go home via the East Indies, and across the Indian Ocean. Before he did, he went ashore at a place somewhere near modern San Francisco, (probably modern Drake's Bay) emptied the ship and cleaned and prepared it for the voyage ahead. He reached the Moluccas in about three months, struck a treaty of trade and mutual defence against the Portuguese with a local Islamic ruler, managed to find room for 6 tons of cloves (half of which, along with various armaments and other weighty non-bullion items, he was forced to jettison when the Golden Hind lodged on a reef shortly after.)
He found his way through the interminable shoals and reefs of what is now Indonesia and into the Indian Ocean – the first English ship to sail on it. He admired the Cape of Good Hope as he passed it, and headed north for home. After watering in Sierra Leone he reached Plymouth in September 1580, 2 years and 9 months since he had departed.
It is debated just how much value was contained in the Golden Hind. After Drake had been allowed by Elizabeth to remove a portion for himself and a similar portion to be split amongst the crew, and not allowing for the jewellery and artefacts given directly to the queen, it is generally agreed that the voyage made a profit to its backers of 47 Pounds for every Pound invested. Elizabeth's share – about half – was sufficient to pay off the kingdom's national debt with a fortune left over. This money was invested in the Levant Company, the profits of which would become the base capital of the East India Company, which itself would become the main source of British mercantile power during the next two centuries. In the shorter term, it allowed England to afford its defence during the Spanish attacks culminating in the Spanish Armada of 1588.
In April 1581, at what these days would be called a glittering occasion, Drake was knighted – by the French envoy, a deliberate slight by the queen of the Spanish ambassador, Mendoza. She also wore new jewellery, made from stones and silver obviously taken from the Spanish in South and Central America. She had already argued with Mendoza, privately, about the legitimacy of Drake's endeavours. Now she felt confident enough – as did the nation – to publicly insult the envoy of the King of Spain and, through him, Phllip II himself. Even the venue was a calculated insult – the deck of the Golden Hind. In effect, it was a declaration of war.
Drake had climbed some rungs up the social ladder. For a while he enjoyed the life of a country gentleman, bought an ex-Cistercian monastery, within walking distance of his birthplace, accepted the revenue from manors given to him by the Queen, became mayor of Plymouth, even became a Member of Parliament. His wife of 12 years, Mary, died in 1582, and he remarried in 1585 – by all accounts a happy union.
In May 1585 an English ship in Bilbao Harbour, Spain, had been boarded by the Spanish king's representative and soldiers dressed as merchants. In the ensuing fracas, the English ship had not only managed to escape, but had taken with it the king's agent. On him was found a document ordering the ship's seizure, signed by the king himself. This removed any doubt within the English government that full-out war was imminent and plans that had been made during the previous months should be put into action.
During July and August a fleet of 21 ships, under the command of Drake with Martin Frobisher as second-in-command was assembled in Plymouth harbour. This harrying of the Spanish on both sides of the Atlantic was to be no piratical adventure – it had the full approval of the Queen and the government of England and the banner of its flagship would be the royal standard of England. Its actions were blatant acts of war. The fleet first threatened and exacted ransom from Vigo in north-west Spain, fanned out as it sailed down the coast of Portugal hoping to catch sight of the annual treasure fleet (the Flota) coming in from the Caribbean (which it missed) then to the Cape Verde Islands where settlements were destroyed before it set off across the Atlantic.
Drake's first target was Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola. The city in the Caribbean was all but destroyed before a ransom was agreed and Drake left. Cartagena on the South American coast was Drake's next objective – it was taken after fierce fighting, ransomed and pillaged. The English left as soon as they could - it was a disease-ridden place - and sailed for home with a detour to visit Raleigh's colony on Roanoke Island.
The venture was not a commercial success; it was not meant to be; but neither was it a complete disaster despite the failure to capture the treasure fleet. It failed on one political point in that Spain was not brought to the bargaining table. It was however a moral victory – it showed that the English had the will and wherewithal to strike at the heart of the Spanish pride. And it consolidated Drake's prestige as the foremost captain of the age. Drake's next venture was to cap his career. He set sail in April 1587 – a fleet of 17 major ships and six pinnaces under orders to do all he could to frustrate the assembling of the ships that day by day were joining the fleet that would become the Spanish Armada. Less than three weeks later, on 19th July, off the Portuguese coast, he received intelligence that Cadiz harbour was full of ships – part of the Armada assemblage. Never one to under-estimate the element of surprise, he sailed straight for Cadiz and entered the outer harbour at 4 0'clock in the afternoon of the 29th July. He brushed off a number of galleys stationed there, and over the next 3 days laid waste to the mass of shipping in the port – destroying well over thirty major craft in total (about a quarter of the number that would sail in the Armada) and an unknown quantity of stores and equipment. The undertaking has come down to us in Drake's words as "singeing the king of Spain's beard". He next headed for the Azores where he captured a Portuguese carrack carrying a thousand pounds of silver (approximately 4 million pounds sterling today.) This dent in the finances of the Spanish king, together with the damage in Cadiz, put back the Armada until the next sailing season.
Drake was made second-in-command of the English fleet preparing to meet the Armada. In charge was Charles Howard of Effingham, Elizabeth's high-admiral since 1585. A competent and aggressive commander, he agreed with Drake that the English should make every effort to meet the Spaniards in their own ports – an attempt to repeat the success of Cadiz. Weather was against them, though and they were blown back to the waters at the head of the English Channel where the Armada arrived on 29 July. Fighting began two days later and was to continue until 6 July when the Spanish fleet dropped anchor off Calais. Harried ceaselessly by Drake and the rest of the English fleet, shepherded away from any opportunity to land on the English coast and bombarded constantly even as it lay at anchor in the Calais broads, it nevertheless remained intact. Their only losses were due to accidents on the first day of battle (from which Drake had benefited the following night when he took the stricken ships, the Rosario, as prize - he would ransom its captain for 3000 pounds.)
In Cadiz Bay the year before, the Spaniards had used fireships against the English. Drake had had no problem in the light airs of that day averting the danger by using his ships' boats to push the flaming vessels to either side of his ships and letting them burn out across the harbour. The situation was different off the French coast with the wind and the currents pushing towards the shore and the Spanish ships, nearly 130 of them packed and at anchor – Drake had eight vessels packed with flammable materials and loaded canon that would fire when the flames reached their breaches. They were not set alight until they were about ten minutes out from the Spanish fleet. Panic ensued as the Spaniards cut their anchor-ropes and made out to sea whichever way they could
The Armada lost all cohesion and began to be picked off individually by the English. For the first time Drake gave the order to close in on the enemy to enable the English heavy guns to be used . The fracas was only halted by a storm. Then a wind change – from the southeast - began forcing the Spaniards to the north. Drake ordered that a flotilla be left at the Straits of Dover to guard against any invasion from France and he and his fellow captains began harrying and shepherding the fragmented Armada ever more into the North Sea.
Drake did well out of the Armada. His share of the prize money for the Rosario alone enabled him to buy the lease of a fine house in London. He however, as well as others, was not satisfied with the damage inflicted on the Spaniards. While superior English seamanship and gunnery had kept the enemy from gaining its goal he felt more could have been done, even by himself. He even wrote to the Queen implying this. And he and other senior captains admitted surprise at the Spanish determination and courage. Drake gained permission to plan and mount a counter-attack.
A private stock company was created with Elizabeth the major shareholder. Drake and Sir John Norreys, a distinguished and successful soldier, were to lead a major expedition, the main aim of which was the capture of Lisbon, the capital of Portugal which, since 1580, had been under the Crown of Spain. It was thought that the Portuguese, many of whom hated Spain, would assist them once they arrived, but the prince the English wanted to install on the Portuguese throne was extremely unpopular so they found themselves on their own. They failed to take Lisbon, weather forced them to abandon raids further south and sickness was rife in the fleet. The adventure was a financial success, mainly because of the amount of shipping captured, but, at least by Drake's standards, not so much as to weigh against the heavy loss of life and the failure to carry out their stated objectives.
For the next few years, while others were earning themselves glory (and keeping the Queen's finances afloat – a major component of England's imports during these years consisted of booty from Spanish shipping and ports.) Drake stayed at home or in London and did his civic duty. He spoke often in Parliament, he organised and partly financed major improvements to Plymouth's water supply and saw to the strengthening of the town's defences. During those same years Spain was learning from the debacle of the Armada. It designed better ships. It organised swifter communications between Iberia and the Caribbean. It reinforced the defences of its American ports. So, that when Francis Drake and John Hawkins started pestering the Queen in 1594 to let them loose on Spanish possessions in the Caribbean they were unaware of what awaited them.
Two squadrons – a total of 27 ships – sailed from Plymouth for the West Indies in August 1595. The venture was ill-favoured from the start; a water-party was ambushed by locals in the Canaries and news of the fleet was rushed to the Indies. They lost one of their ships to the Spaniards off Guadeloupe. A major blow was the death of Sir John Hawkins off Puerto Rico. The town of San Juan in Puerto Rico was well prepared for their arrival and able to resist them. The weather turned against them, slowing their progress towards the Isthmus of Panama and dysentery had started to sweep the fleet. The attack on Panama was a disaster, capped shortly after by the death from dysentery of Drake himself on 27 January 1596.
Drake was perhaps the greatest of the Elizabethan "sea-dogs" and the years have only increased his legendary status. He was certainly a superb leader of men, fearless in battle, a fine tactician and capable of confounding the enemy by the very daring of his actions. He was not as assured as a strategist however, and while loved by his men (and the yeoman folk of England) he could be disloyal to his fellow captains and was known to let greed get in the way of common purpose. The belief that "Drake defeated the Armada " is completely wrong; as is the belief he introduced the potato to England.
Lore has it that at the times of need Drake will return to confound the enemy if the drum that accompanied his circumnavigation and now resides in Buckland Abbey, the ex-monastery he bought on his return to Devon, is beaten. The last reports of it being heard were during the Dunkirk operation in 1940. The legend was put into poetry by Sir Henry Newbolt, and later set to music by Charles Villiers Stanford. [1]
- Drake he's in his hammock an' a thousand mile away,
- (Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?)
- Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay,
- An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe.
- Yarnder lumes the island, yarnder lie the ships, 5
- Wi' sailor lads a-dancin' heel-an'-toe,
- An' the shore-lights flashin', an' the night-tide dashin'
- He sees et arl so plainly as he saw et long ago.
- Drake he was a Devon man, an' ruled the Devon seas,
- (Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?), 10
- Rovin' tho' his death fell, he went wi' heart at ease,
- An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe,
- "Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,
- Strike et when your powder's runnin' low;
- If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port o' Heaven, 15
- An' drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago."
- Drake he's in his hammock till the great Armadas come,
- (Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?),
- Slung atween the round shot, listenin' for the drum,
- An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe. 20
- Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,
- Call him when ye sail to meet the foe;
- They shall find him, ware an' wakin', as they found him long ago.


text:
US job recovery: Half way there
ANN ARBOR—Over the next two years, the U.S. economy will regain the rest of the nearly 9 million jobs lost in the Great Recession, say economists at the University of Michigan.
Employment fell by 8.8 million jobs during the 2008-09 economic downturn, but the economy has recovered 4.5 million jobs in the last three years. By the end of 2014, another 4.3 million jobs will be added as the economy grows at a moderate pace with steadily falling unemployment, they say.
"The pundits had been reminding us for months that no incumbent president since Franklin Roosevelt had been re-elected with the unemployment rate higher than 7.2 percent and it was 7.9 percent in October. The presidential election is over, the voters have spoken, and yet President Obama will now serve another term," said U-M economist Joan Crary. "Although the macroeconomy is still underperforming, it apparently was not bad enough to deny the president another four years."
In their annual forecast of the U.S. economy, Crary and colleagues Daniil Manaenkov and Matthew Hall predict the creation of 2 million jobs in 2013 and another 2.3 million in 2014 as unemployment falls from 7.9 percent to 7.2 percent during that time.
They project overall economic output growth (as measured by real Gross Domestic Product) of 2 percent in 2013 and 2.6 percent in 2014—compared to last year's 1.8 percent and this year's 2.1 percent growth.
In addition to moderate growth in GDP and employment over the next two years, the forecast calls for a solid recovery in the housing market. Single-family starts—at an all-time low in 2011—increased by about 100,000 units this year to 540,000. They are expected to rise to 750,000 next year and to more than 1 million in 2014.
Existing single-family home sales are projected to rise from 3.8 million in 2011 to 4.9 million by 2014—an annual increase of about 400,000 over the forecast period.
"The collapse of private residential construction following the bursting of the housing bubble was unprecedented," Manaenkov said. "After scraping along the bottom during 2009–10, single-family housing starts finally started to rise late in 2011. However, new housing starts are well below the level needed to keep up with new household formation, suggesting that starts will need to keep rising at a rapid pace for some time."
According to the forecast, both interest rates and inflation will remain at moderate levels over the next two years. Core inflation, currently at 2.1 percent, will inch downward and remain below 2 percent over the next two years.
Conventional mortgage rates will creep upward during the forecast period from a current 3.4 percent to 3.7 percent in 2013 and 4.1 percent the year after—still attractive by historical standards. The 10-year Treasury note will edge up from 1.8 percent this quarter to 2.4 percent by the end of 2014, while the three-month Treasury bill rate will hold steady at 0.1 percent.
Finally, the forecast predicts that light vehicle sales—on pace this year to post the largest annual increase since 1984—will continue to improve from 12.7 million units in 2011 to 14.3 million this year, 15 million next year and 15.6 million in 2014.
Overall, the U-M economists say that despite projected growth and higher employment, many economic headwinds will continue to plague the recovery.
"By now, most are well aware of the fiscal cliff the economy is facing at the end of the year if the lame-duck Congress does not act," Crary said. "The European debt crisis has ebbed and flowed but remains unresolved. It appears that the belt-tightening actions that have been taken thus far have helped drive the Eurozone back into recession.
"World trade has also been impacted by the deceleration in the Chinese economy. The spate of unusual weather across the nation this year has taken both a human and an economic toll. We will need to continue to navigate these economic—and perhaps natural—hazards in the year ahead."
The U-M forecast is based on the Michigan Quarterly Econometric Model of the U.S. Economy and compiled by the U-M Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics. For more information, visit http://www.umich.edu/~rsqe.
Related Links:
- An executive summary of the U.S Economic Outlook is available at http://rsqe.econ.lsa.umich.edu/?page=forecasts
- U-M Outlook for Consumption is available at http://www.sca.isr.umich.edu


text:
Beginning with qualifying tomorrow at Brno, the factory BMW WSB squad was to take to the track with bikes specially decorated to promote the new Batman movie, "The Dark Knight Rises". The body panels are already painted, and were to be placed on the bikes this evening, but in light of a massacre at a movie theater in Colorado last evening during opening night of the movie, and to show respect to the victims, BMW has decided to run its normal livery this weekend.
16 Comments
Run 'em in Laguna
Yawn. Wake me when the commercial break is over. Slow news day.
Sure would like to see the livery. I don't think BMW would lose any customer's. The draw back would be bad coverage from our news media, which are a bunch of rating craving whores
I like your characterization of the news media. On a day like this past Friday, the sum total of the information they had could be read in thirty seconds or less. Maybe a full minute, at most. But throughout the day, they struggle to think up different ways of saying to make it seem like they have more information. But they don't. At the very end of that day, the information they had was not appreciably any more than they had early that morning. Still not more than a minute's worth of information, which they hashed over and over and over throughout the day. The agenda that underlies it all, and always has, is singular: selling advertising.
In Reality, any big entity must consider any negative publicity. Everyone will see the event differently, but as the saying goes, the squeaky wheel is the one that gets greased. Hence, they must be careful to the extreme. I may run them, with some little sticker of love and peace on the side, but, they must do what is SAFEST for the company.
They just don't like to tempt fate – any crash in black would immediately be spun into another "batman" casualty. It was probably the movie promoters who asked BMW to put it away, they have enough publicity to handle for now.
Propriety 1: Relevance 0…but what has that ever had to do with it? -
This act of terrorism will, unfortunately, be inexorably tied to this movie and those of us who still value lives over a marketing gimmick feel BMW is doing the right thing. The shootings happened 10 miles from where I live, and the senselessness has had a palpable effect on the people of this metro area, this state, and this country. There is zero reason, financial or otherwise, for BMW to become the first motorcycle manufacturer to actively point to a tragedy on the side of their race bikes 48 hours after the shootings occurred.
BMW is a high profile company. an unfortunate by-product of this success is that the Roundel is often viewed as a "bullseye" (something to take aim at), thus they have to avoid any appearance of impropriety. for them, anything in doubt ='s DON'T. it's not like they're going to miss the money.
I dont believe BMW was trying to grab headlines or win points as much as they were trying NOT to be the target of REACTIVE comments etc. if they went ahead with the plan. I agree that we should not feel we have to boycott things or change our directions in response this type of mindless act. But I can see why BMW didn't want ANY association WHATSOEVER with the week's tradgedy.
There is no place for "Political Correctness" in a free society.
It's turned this nation into a bunch of mamby pamby's, afraid of saying what's really on their mind, so not offend someone.
I agree with mpolans.-
"There is no place for 'Pollitical Correctness' in a free society."
Not sure what "political correctness" and "free society" have to do with this issue at all.
When I am not feeling cynical I might think BMW removed the black out of respect to those who lost their lives, or who lost a loved one. If I am feeling more cynical, I'd believe BMW removed the black out of fear of backlash from paying customer sfor their sensitivity.
Obviously BMW is free to keep it black or change it. So freedom doesn't have anything to do with it.
Political correctness has nothing to do with it. It's simple good PR business.
So your statement does not make any sense at all, doesn't it?
Try again …
So you get to be the arbiter of behavior in a free society? Sounds great!
Or maybe whoever is paid to make such decisions at BMW made one. In a free society, there should be nothing wrong with that.
Such tragic loss and inexplicable. A fitting gesture by BMW. My thoughts and prayers to all the victims and their families and to all of mankind.
What does batman livery have to do with a mass shooting? How is that paying respect? Should everyone refrain from watching any DC comics related movies for the next week? Perhaps no going to a movie theater for month, only watching DVDs at home, to show respect? It was an evil act by a person in CO that cost people their lives, but I don't see Team BMW's logic unless they were just trying to grab some headlines by piggybacking on this tragedy by the thinnest of excuses.
Bingo! free publicity. that is what these wankers are getting. respect? please! since when did the big business care about someone's feelings? lawsuits and loss of profit: that is what they're afraid of.


text:
Did you know that one of the most popular New Year's resolutions that people select is to spend more time with family and friends?
We love the idea of making time to better keep in touch with loved ones but know that it's not always easy when you have a busy schedule and family or friends who live far away.
While email and text messages have helped to keep long distance friends and family members in touch with each other, we think they lack somewhat of a personal touch. Which is why we'd like to challenge our readers too add a personal touch to their resolution and to make time to stay in touch with family and friends by using hand-written letters!
We love the warm and fuzzy feeling you get from receiving a hand-written note, knowing that your loved one was thinking of you. The act of hand-writing a letter is becoming rare and we'd like to do something about that, so PersonalizationMall.com would like to challenge you with the "2012 Resolutions with A Personal Touch Contest!"
All you need to do is send an email with the subject line "Resolutions Contest" to email@example.com before midnight Wednesday, January 25th with the following information:
- The name and relation of the person you would like to keep in touch with more often in 2012.
- A brief sentence or two as to why this person is so important to you and why you'd like to keep better in touch with them.
- Your full name and email address that you'd like to be contacted at if you are selected as the winner.
The contest winner, who will be selected by the A Personal Touch staff, will win their very own set of Personally Yours© Personalized Note Cards & Envelopes that will help them get started with their resolution! The staff will be looking for the most touching entry and we will announce the winner in a post Thursday, January 26th so be sure to get your entry in before then!
We can't wait to hear all about your loved ones and how you plan to send them love with A Personal Touch one letter at a time!
Good luck!